The monster squirmed on the ground like a giant worm; its massive tail flopped and crashed every couple of seconds like a comet hammering into the forest floor from above, throwing up dirt and leaves in a chaotic storm, polluting the air with muddy dirt that coated Colt’s tongue.
The very feel of it hitting again and again reverberated through Colt’s chest; each thud, while not directly hitting him, still had a physical blow to his bones.
Nate wobbled away from the monster, its jaw snapping at empty air, trying to catch him and swallow him whole.
Missing a leg, it struggled uselessly to move its body with any coordination. And now, Colt would take even that away.
Colt took a deep breath and wrapped his Edict along his knife, pouring himself and every ounce of soul into it. He could hear the way the world folded and sang, its song a rich tapestry of weaving Edicts, the very laws that formed the universe.
The dino roared with an earsplitting drone, the wave of sound carried notes of dread that launched an assault on his mind. When stripped of its other weapons, the boss threw out whatever it had in its arsenal.
More leaves fell from above, a shower of shattered greenery as the roar and pounding tail dislodged foliage from miles above.
Colt honed his will and moved to position, then focused.
The cut ran in an upward arc—and tore right into the joint of the boss’s only remaining leg where it met thigh. Blood poured from the wound as his will suddenly contested the bosses’. This time, the monster tried to resist, tried to push its dread and inevitability against Colt’s will. Wrestling him on another plane of existence. A cold bead of sweat ran down his forehead, a welcome mark that this took effort to achieve; if it was hard, he would grow.
Colt took the monster’s will and slammed it aside.
His second cut ripped the second leg off without much sound until the mighty thump of leg meat crashed into the ground next to Colt.
The dinosaur roared again; pain and fear played a discordant note in the whine.
Colt gave a shuddering breath and pulled back, watching as the boss struggled on the floor like a wet noodle, flopping back and forth as it failed to regain a sense of where it was, what was happening to it, or how it could damage its enemies. Blood poured from its many wounds; the two remaining stumps that were its legs a veritable hose of blood to water the forest.
It screamed and tantrumed and raged.
Colt wiped the sweat off his head. The noise was annoying and deafening, and just the onslaught of this beast was driving him to have a headache. His back-to-back strong uses of his Edict were starting to wear his will away.
“This thing has some vitality, huh?” Colt considered the noodle of a monster as it wriggled, trying to calculate how many more cuts he needed to make. Optimized for efficiency. The sooner this monster was ended, the better. Even though its coordination was understandably non-existent, the way that tail snapped and tore into nearby trees and the sheer mass of squirming bulk was dangerous and unpredictable.
Nate had pulled away, too, studying the now-disabled boss.
He’s waiting for me—
No. Nate wasn’t.
The hammer in his hand grew, the steel expanding and forming into a larger weapon. Nate raised it high above his head, light reflecting off the morphing metal surface. It was like he wielded a stick of liquid metal, shaping and reforming. The end increasingly ridden with deathly sharp spikes, growing like icicles off the side of a gutter.
Nate shuddered as he held the weapon high. The sun above cast him in light like a god of vengeance.
Then, Nate let out a roar; his Edict raged, pushing back against the waves of Dread cast by the dinosaur, fighting it in a fist-to-fist brawl as the two went at it. Nate took a step forward. The dinosaur squirmed. Nate took another step, then several. He broke out into a full-blown sprint, each and every one of his steps throwing dirt and rocks behind him.
And then Nate tossed himself into the sky, both hands on the handle of his massive hammer, the dinosaur’s head right there in front of him, jaw snapping.
Nate smashed into it with force and weight that carried through the monster’s massive skull and into the earth, shaking the trees and Colt enough that he almost stumbled. The spiked hammer dug into the side of the boss’s jaw; the sheer momentum and weight of the hit made the dino’s head crack off the hammer, into the ground, and then back onto the spikes of Nate’s weapon.
The T-rex tried to let loose another wave of Dread with a roar… But its mouth wouldn’t function.
Nate has ruined its jaw.
His friend sat on top of the head, one foot near its eye—the monster jerked around, trying to throw him off. Nate responded by squishing the heel of his boot into the soft and fleshy white of its pupil, which only brought more useless screaming from the once mighty boss.
Pride and fear welled in Colt’s chest as he watched his friend: pride to see such strength, fear with the sorry that something could go wrong. The hammer kept Nate grounded on the monster’s skulls as it tried everything it could do to get free. Nate didn’t mind. He waited with the patience of a man about to commit murder.
When it stopped moving for a second, his hammer pulled out of the dinosaur’s face with a gush of blood and then crashed down again, caving in more of the skull. They went like this for minutes. Nate diligently held onto his weapon as it tried to dislodge him. It squirmed and struggled beneath a man that might as well be the size of a rat compared to it. Yet it could do nothing. Gigantic and powerful, rendered to an ineffectual hitting dummy beneath the heel of Nate.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
Smash. Crash. Slam.
Again, and again, the hammer went down, the skull beneath it turning to a paste, the bones that made up the skull splintering to the size of nails, which each further hit of the hammer drove into the dinosaur's brain, just like hammering a nail into a piece of wood.
Colt felt his hand itch where he held his knife, but held back and watched, gathering his reserves. If this monster had a trick hidden away, he’d be the one to run in and stop it. That was his job now; that and watching his friend work.
He remembered the very first moment he understood the type of man Nate was, when he rushed to help him with the Kobolds. Back then, Colt had been in it for himself.
Watching Nate now, he couldn’t help but feel a radiant warmth of gratefulness in his chest to have such a brutal ally at his side.
Nate was meticulous—never straying, never complaining. When he had the opportunity to hammer, he did just that. A man driven and completely engaged in his task. Soon, there was no fight in the monster as its body quit responding to its broken brain.
From there, the hammer came down in a rhythm. Each crash radiated outward like a giant stomping on the ground, creating a drumbeat of death.
Inevitably, the notification appeared.
———
You have defeated Tyrannous X - Level 60
You have leveled up!
You have leveled up!
You have 6 Stat points to spend. You have gained 2 points of Dexterity and 2 points of Soul.
Dungeon Alert: Tyrannous X has been defeated!
Congratulations!
Csaba The Great must still be defeated before the dungeon exit is opened.
———
Nate shuddered atop the mound of pulped flesh and what was left of the skull of the dinosaur. Half of the monster was missing, creating a mess beneath his feet that was nearly too difficult to look at, let alone stand on.
The difference between the damage wrought through a clean knife stroke and a hammer was… Well, something to behold.
Colt rushed over to his friend as Nate slipped, trying to get down, giving him a hand up and helping him take those few necessary steps away from the corpse of another life that might be considered a monster too impossible to take down. His bicep strained as he tried to lift the guy, and he grunted with the effort. Nate was heavy; that ‘Steel Skin’ skill was quite literal.
“That was brutal,” Colt remarked as they got away from the body of their enemy—he looked around the area. There was no ‘loot.’ Which one might expect from a boss fight, but this thing wasn’t in a typical boss area—no predefined circle or place, and they’d just happened across this big guy randomly.
He wondered if there was a treasure buried in that corpse… Colt looked at his knife, took in the giant’s corpse, and then checked on his struggling friend, whose chest was caved in with a nice dent in it. How was he even breathing?
“Damn. We don’t have a healer here, man.”
“Give me time. Forge… Well, I think… I can use it to fix myself. It feels like… I can fix parts of me if I focus. Make them better than before.” Nate collapsed not far away, sitting down with a grimace.
Holy shit. That’s awesome. I’m jealous. Colt didn’t say that, though; he thought about it, but in the end, came out with a simple, “You did stellar, man.”
“I did what I needed to do. Give me like twenty, and we can return to everyone else.” Nate’s jaw was clutched, and his grip tight on the hammer. Not seconds later, the guy gave up on sitting and collapsed, focused on his breath.
Colt felt the Edict weaving around him, working on his insides. In a way, it was like Nate had gone into a cocoon. A wonderful little caterpillar morphing in a shell of an edict.
Well, Forge was a good one, then, and Nate was taking it by the reigns and running with it. All they needed to do was get Sarah a nice Edict to call her own. Jimmy, too, if the guy was willing to take up life as an adventurer again.
Colt spun the knife in his hand and took another searching gaze at the dinosaur corpse.
Bosses should have loot, and he had twenty minutes to kill. Was he really about to dig through an actual mountain of flesh to test a videogame theory?
###
Of course, he dug through a mountain of flesh for twenty minutes. Like a surgeon, applications of cut let him pull pieces off the monster and take it apart. Thankfully, Nate was too passed out and focused on pulling himself together to judge the fact that he was mindlessly eviscerating the body.
It paid off, though.
———
Prehistoric Asteroid Shard [Uncommon]
Description: An ancient piece of space rock that came from the heavens and ended up inside the stomach of an ancient and gigantic monster. This Asteroid Shard has properties that, when used with meditation, can help refine insights into associated Edicts.
Up to you to determine whether or not you have one of those Edicts. If you know, you know.
You only get one use of this as the essence remaining of edicts in it are weak, so hopefully, you use it wisely.
*Inspect* (Intermediate) has gained a level!
———
Colt tossed the light chunk of purple rock and then caught it again. Its surface was oddly smooth to the touch, and how it caught the light cracking in from above made it gleam.
More than that, when he ran his senses over it, he felt it whisper to him, tugging at the Movement Edict. Trying to… Direct it. If he sat down and meditated, he was sure it had some resonance with that particular law. Which wasn’t hard to conceptualize why, at least, he thought. It gave the sense of movement; it moved quite a bit, crossing the great celestial space above. Moving was one of the few things it could do up there.
And when it smashed into the planet, it’d done so with quite a lot of force and movement.
At least, that’s why Colt thought it did. Either way, he would tuck it away and focus on it later. With the treasure secured, he turned his attention to the stat points from leveling. Two to soul, two to endurance, two to dexterity. Advancing the three cores of what he believed led to survivability and strength.
With all those minor details sorted, he returned to Nate’s side and checked on his friend.
“Good to go?”
“No. But I’ll endure. We’ll get to them and hike. A day or two of recovery, and I think I’ll be able to fix most of the damage.” Nate’s jaw was still tight, and Colt sensed that there was more than some pain involved in whatever process he was undergoing.
Colt offered him his hand, and his friend took it. The grip was that of steel—to pull him up took a grunt and Colt digging in his heels to the earth, but they got there.
Carefully, the two of them made their way back to the group. They would have to figure out the rest of the mission together.
There was a mountain to scale. Once they reached the mountain, they had a final boss to kill. One could only hope that the people who got here before them were tucked away, hiding somewhere. Colt kept that thought far from his head, focusing on the here and now, and took their journey one exhausted step at a time.
First step, get back to the rest of their friends.
